"I want to play with Aizawa-Sensei..."
The woman's voice was a saccharine coo, disgustingly sweet, thick like syrup as it dribbled into his ears. Aizawa couldn't help but shudder in spite of himself, due in part to his anger and in part to the confused agitation he felt. There was some sort of familiarity here, he knew that voice. Yet another part of him screamed in the depths of his mind, subdued and distant, something felt off, wrong, unnatural and strange. He continued to stare at the figure before him, feeling a sickly sensation like bile rising in his throat, choking him from within.
It was a woman, there was no doubt about that, a female form taken and shrink-wrapped in rubber as some kind of fetishized parody of a hero or villain. And yet... the rubber didn't glisten like the sorts of outfits Midnight wore to special events and galas when she felt like stirring up some tabloid controversy. It was dull, almost matte, like nitrile rather than latex with only the faintest shine to hint at its synthetic nature. The sexualization was clearly secondary to the functionality of the whole affair, if the strangely utilitarian design of the pouch-covered belt or armoured shoulders was any indication.
And yet there was a blatant, disconcerting sexuality in it; each breast individually pocketed in a way that drew the untamed eye but left the sternum blatantly open to strike, the rear wedged tight between the cheeks of the posterior to once again distract. There were no heels, but the outfit took the opposite approach in that each toe was separately sheathed. And even in these details there was purpose; the metal outlining the chest dipped between the breasts, armouring the sternum in steel. The rear was tight all the way around, but clearly flexible with how the woman was able to bend and twist as she circled him. And the footwear was, for its bizarre design, seemingly practical with denser rubberized soles and a proper gripping tread.
It was a strange appearance, to be sure. The head was where things changed; the rubber gave way to a helmet, smooth and round and almost vantablack with how dark it was, without a visible visor or holes for eyes. It rendered the head a strange smooth thing on all sides, a capsule of sorts, with no defined face or crown or back. And it turned and followed his movements when he slipped to one side, and he narrowed his eyes. Perhaps the material was treated in some way; opaque on the outside, transparent within? There was a strange circular metal ornament on her back, two thin crescent shapes crossed over one another at the middle of her back. What purpose that served he couldn't say.
Still, he felt sick to his stomach as he stared. Something was wrong, very clearly wrong, something was happening that he hadn't accounted for. He continued to stare at her, hands slowly inching up towards his capture weapon, pulling it loose and readying it to throw. Her head inclined a little towards him, as if acknowledging his action, her hands reaching over her shoulders towards that strange circular ornament on her back, grabbing two handles previously unseen and pulling it into two halves. Not an ornament, he realized, as the wickedly curved blades glinted in the moonlight. Swords, two of them, beautifully crafted, like two long, narrow crescent moons of steel with a handle near one end each.
She brandished them, pointing them at him, and Aizawa swallowed, waiting for the Quirk. She didn't seem particularly mutated, so it was either Transformation or Emitter. Given her choice of dress Transformation was unlikely, so Emitter was the most likely. And yet... she giggled once, then twice, a peal of tittering little laughs escaping her, and Aizawa stared and waited, sick to his stomach, ignoring the ache behind his eyes and the sensation of wrongness, of something being so different and not-right it demanded immediate correction.
Was this her Quirk? Some sort of projected radius or sight activated trigger of nausea and discomfort? Aizawa had seen a few Quirks like that before, though none quite this pervasive and disturbing. Perhaps it was intensified by his own strange sense of familiarity with the villain? But that made no sense either; he didn't know her. He'd never seen her before in his life, he would have remembered such weapons and garb as these, if not for the aesthetic than at least for the sheer bizarreness of it all.
"Aizawa-Sensei..." she cooed, stepping closer to him, swords at her sides now. "Don't you wanna play with me?"
A step forward, another step, those rubber-wrapped feet padding softly across the floor. It wasn't so much a walk as a strut, hips swinging, shoulders held perfectly still. Aizawa narrowed his eyes beneath his goggles, and then froze again, shock setting him rigid and that nausea deepening and turning to a black pit of dread in his stomach as he realized just what was so utterly wrong about all of this.
His Quirk wouldn't activate.
The woman giggled at his expression, the excitement in her gait obvious. She was walking for him, to allure, attract, distract, but most of all to present. It was as if she were a model on a runway, and he was a critic of some kind, tasked with evaluating her; the swords swayed to and fro, the hips from side to side, the gait was slow, even and merciless in its sensuality. She wanted him to look, she needed him to look, but his Quirk wasn't working, his Erasure WASN'T WORKING...
"It's not very fun when it's your Quirk that won't go, is it Sensei?" she asked, head cocking to one side and a little giggle escaping her when he audibly grunted with something that definitely wasn't fear, he was NOT afraid but his Erasure wasn't working he couldn't make her stop... "Yeah... at least now we can have a fun fight without any stupid games, right? No counting down until you blink or something stupid like that- we just have to fight and fight and fight until I prove I'm good enough, right?"
Aizawa didn't reply. It was only logical; she was trying to get into his head. She was trying to push him off-balance, play with his emotions and mental state. And it was working; he had never felt this sinking sensation of dread before.
Except...
He had.
A long time ago.
"Aizawa-Sensei..." the woman cooed his name like a lovesick dove, taking another step forward and brandishing those twin crescent blades with a little twirl and flourish. "Won't you teach me a lesson? I've been so naughty..."
Aizawa swallowed back that sickly sensation that cling to the insides of his throat, grasping his scarf in both hands. The woman giggled again, her stance dropping down, knees bending and feet turning, her back arching forward slightly. Then the swords came up, the right horizontal to the ground, held higher than her head with the left vertically oriented, blade turned toward him. He dropped into his stance as well. No Quirk. Well... at least hers was a similar idea to his own. But this pervading sense of discomfort, this abyssal pit in his stomach that yawned with dreadful certainty...
Then she lunged, and there was no more time for thinking.
They didn't fight. Fighting was giving and taking, brutality and elegance all at once. This... this was a dance. He moved aside, time and time again, slipping away from her endless cavalcade of slashes and stabs, nimbly twisting his body between the silver streaks of her swords. He attempted to snatch at her legs, her arms, even her neck with his capture tool, but in return all he got for his efforts was a cut across his forearm and a matching wound on his cheek.
She pressed closer at one point, and he seized the chance; his capture tool was almost uncuttable, treated carbon nanotubes worked into the material by special request. He wrapped it around her swords, trapping her close to him, holding her in place... then he knocked her helmet off. It took a twist of his hips and a raised elbow awkwardly striking at the bottom lip right where her chin would be, but the helmet came off with surprising ease. Aizawa stared at his opponent, and suddenly something horrible and horrifying and all too logical clicked into place.
"Sensei..."
She was blushing. As she had in the nurse's office three years ago, when he told her she needed to take better care of herself. As she had whenever he had said anything remotely positive about her improvement as a potential hero. As she had when she had left chocolate on his desk during Valentine's Day...
As she had when she had kissed him on the cheek and then taken off toward the training ground, the day she crippled Judai Issho. Her last day as a student at UA. Her last day as a member of Class 2-A.
Ishizu Sorano stared at him with narrowed eyes, blushing scarlet like a maiden at the wedding altar. She looked wrong, off, dark bags under her sparkling green eyes and an unhealthy pallor to her skin. Her hair was a tangled mess of black cut short and messy, the ends barely falling to her neck. There was a scar on the underside of her chin, fresh and recent.
She giggled under his examination, twisting her head a little so he could see the scar running under her right ear, the very place she had cracked against a jutting spar of steel rebar in Training Ground 12. Then the blush faded and her thin lips twisted into a grin, identical to something Midnight had once described as 'sultry'. She leaned in closer, taking advantage of his shock, and kissed him in a long and passionate sort of way. She even bit him, the tiniest bit, teeth nibbling at his bottom lip
He planted a knee in her stomach, and she retched and staggered backward, sliding her swords free of his capture tool. He also stepped back, trying to get some distance and some time to think about what was happening. The pit of dread was gone now, it had faded to nothing. Now he was just... confused.
"Aizawa-Sensei..." she whined like a spoilt child. "That was so~~ mean..."
"What are you doing, Ishizu?" The words escaped him before he could stop them, his mouth moving without any conscious thought, and he watched as her face lit up and she giggled again.
"Aizawa-Sensei said I wasn't good enough..." she cooed, her swords slowly twirling in her hands. "He said I didn't have any potential... so I thought, maybe I can't be a hero. And then Sensei will never love me. But, if I couldn't be a hero..."
She looked him in the eyes, the sickly green of her irises shimmering in the low light.
"Then maybe I could be a villain." she said, the slightest crack in her otherwise childish sing-song showing him that it was all just an act. "And then Aizawa-Sensei would have to chase me down and we could be together like we were always meant to be…"
If she meant to say anything more, it was drowned out in an instant by the thunderous sound of an angry Katsuki Bakugo expressing his boundless rage, accompanied by a flash of blue as Dabi matched the blonde blast for blast. The warehouse wasn't on fire… yet. It likely would be in time, given a few moments at least. Ishizu smiled at him again, her eyes glinting in the light of the fire and explosions.
Bakugo let loose another detonation, one that threatened to engulf Mr. Compress. Aizawa's eyes flicked to the side to see it all better, and that was all the opening Ishizu needed. In an instant one of her swords flashed through the air, and Aizawa just barely caught the blade with his capture weapon. It was a feint, of course, the other blade lunging for his stomach. He twisted away from the attack, the sword only grazing him, and brought one leg up in another kick. She darted back away from him, twirling her swords in her hands. She was facing away from the door, Bakugo, Dabi and Compress' brawl behind her. He was facing her down, doing his best now to ignore the fight in the background.
At the sound of yet another blast, Ishizu lunged again. Both swords were shining in the orange and blue light, but this time he was focused entirely on her. Her head jerked to one side, dodging a punch aimed square at her face. As if it were acting under a mind of its own, one of her swords twisted impossibly, making her entire wrist bend in a way that a wrist should not bend, just to slash upwards along his face, biting into his cheek again and then trailing up to cut his brow. Blood trickled into his left eye, causing him to blink, wince and stagger back. Ishizu did the same, giving him space for some unknown reason. He took the opportunity to wipe at his eye, to try and get his vision back.
But then he heard a familiar sound, one that made his teeth itch, followed then by maddened laughter that must have come from Tomura Shigaraki. He didn't look, he couldn't afford to take his eyes off Ishizu, but he knew the sensation and more importantly he knew the sound. Kurogiri had arrived, or at least one of his warp gates had.
Ishizu glanced over his shoulder and he lunged, taking advantage of the momentary distraction to come at her low and from the side. She reacted a moment too late, his capture tool had wrapped around her right arm and pulled it back, her sword falling from loosened fingers before he lunged forward, dragging her arm with him and pulling her off balance before landing behind her. He threw the other end of the scarf back behind him and felt it catch on her torso. It took her right under the ribs, and he pulled it tight.
Her body slammed into his, pinning them back to back, and hurriedly he twisted his wrist to make a loop in the capture tool to take her around the neck. He pulled that arm up, and wrenched forwards, and the choked gasp she took as the reinforced fabric wrapped around her thin neck was like music to his ears.
"I'm ending this now, Ishizu." he warned her, voice a fatigued growl. "Stand down, or-"
Cold.
A deep, biting cold in his stomach, accompanied by a surge of icy pain like a lance in his stomach. His body twitched, his head fell as strength left him, and he noticed the thin silver line emerging from the centre of his stomach, covered in so much red. Red that was coming from him, it seemed, flowing from the wound in his stomach, falling to the cement floor and pooling in a puddle that was much too big to be healthy. He coughed, and tasted copper, felt a wetness dribble out past his lips and down his chin, soaking his capture tool. Two swords. Two. But the angle of the blow… she must have stabbed through herself to get at him.
"Sensei~~" Ishizu whispered, her head right next to his as she bent her body back, and he could hear the wetness in her voice as some of her own blood fell from her lips. "Am I good enough now?"
She freed herself of his capture tool with a few careful twists of her body, shoving him backwards and letting him topple down to the ground on his stomach. The sword slid free of both their stomachs with a vicious sucking sound, and he dropped with a heavy thud. The world was quieter now, sounds distant, each of Bakugo's explosions more like muffled thunder in the distance. He coughed up more red, all over the dirty warehouse floor. He forced his head up, looking at the back of the warehouse wear Shigaraki was back on his feet, cackling madly as another warp gate opened up.
He saw Kurogiri emerge holding two tiny bundles, one in each arm, and then the world went black.
Edited by the overwhelmingly awesome Unsettling-A.I.R